Originally posted on July 20, 2014, by cruisingrunner
It’s extremely difficult, dare I say, impossible, to stay active on passage. Running is out of the question for obvious reasons. At least I hope it’s obvious. It is obvious, right? The boat motion is a huge hindrance. It’s hard enough just to move about the boat doing mundane things like, oh I don’t know, walking, that thinking about doing anything more ambitious seems downright dangerous. I have heard of people using stairstepper machines, but I just can’t see it, unless you are motoring along in dead calm seas, I just don’t see how you would keep your balance on such a thing. One option could be doing stair repeats in one of the companion ways [note 1] while holding on to the handrail, but this seems even more overwhelmingly boring than when I used to walk the stairs in our condominium with a sleeping baby in a front pack because I was desperate for exercise. And forget about Yoga. This is hard enough at anchor with the little bit of bobbing and swinging, forget about it underway. Stretching, just stretching, is an option. It’s easy to hold on or sit down in order to do a little stretching. But that’s about it.
But, oh, if that were the only hindrance to physical activity. If only there weren’t another whole layer of issues for some of us to contend with. The motion of the boat makes it hard to move about, but it also causes havoc in other, more intolerable ways as well. I’m talking, of course, about sea sickness. Half of our crew, my husband and 12 year old son Alex, have absolutely no problem with this. They can read, play on the computer, do school work, do boat projects, all while the boat is rocking and rolling and heaving about. Unfortunately, the other half of our crew, me and my 11 year old son Brenden, are not so lucky.
Sea sickness is a very broad terms and has many different manifestations, from sea lethargy to sea dizziness to sea queasiness to the full fledged sea vomiting. For me, it very rarely goes beyond sea lethargy, which I call, “The Blehs.” The Blehs are very powerful, though, and they sap all of your energy and hinder any and all productivity. I’m not just talking about exercise, I’m talking about cooking dinner or even brushing your teeth. When you have The Blehs, you simply don’t want to do anything. You cannot function like your usual self.
It is very hard to describe. In fact, while planning this blog post in my head I realized that I cannot even give a list of symptoms that I feel when I have The Blehs. You know, like when you have the cold or the flu and you can say that your throat hurts and your nose is congested, and you are achy and cold with fever. I’ve thought about it, and I’ve really tried, and I cannot tell you what is wrong with me when I have The Blehs. I can’t say that this hurts or that doesn’t feel well, I mean, I very rarely, if ever, even feel nauseated. The only thing I can point to is what I feel like doing. For example, yesterday at lunch time there was no way I could even fathom fixing anything, not even a glass of water, for lunch, and I knew that Brenden was feeling the same way, and I also knew it was important for us to eat. So, I asked Alex to make ramen noodles for us, and I only had to give him a second’s worth of puppy dog eyes for him to agree. Oh yeah, and I had to say it would be good for Brenden’s tummy. Those brothers, they look out for each other. In contrast, today, I had no trouble preparing cheese and crackers and then making a tuna poke with the fresh yellow fin tuna we had in the fridge. There’s just no accounting for what the difference was in how I felt. I can’t explain it. On the one hand I just wanted to crawl in bed and close my eyes and do absolutely nothing and on the other hand I was pretty close to my normal self.
Yesterday, late in the afternoon, I was lying in bed with The Blehs, and all of a sudden, I noticed myself thinking about how messy the salon was and that I really need to give it a thorough cleaning. Without even knowing it I had started to feel better, and my only clue was that I now cared that the salon was a mess, because an hour before with a huge case of The Blehs, I couldn’t have cared a whisper that there was any mess anywhere in the boat.
Usually The Blehs are shortlived and last only a day or so. However, sometimes they can linger on, like this current passage, where it has taken me about four days to get my sea legs. And sometimes they can come and go depending on the changing nature of the boat motion. It all has to do with boat motion. Some motion is much more physiologically tolerable than others, it seems.
So, yeah, staying active on passage has its challenges. But luckily passage making represents a very small percentage of our overall cruising experience. And given the fact that we get to visit places cruising that we never would have otherwise, I guess it’s a necessary evil, and one I willingly endure.
-D
[note 1] If you know anything about boats you might be confused about my plural use of the word “companionway,” since the companionway is the stairway that leads down from the cockpit to the living area down below. But if you know just a little bit more about boats you might immediately understand that we have a catamaran, which has two hulls, hence two companionways.
Gresham Family Exodus 